# Acts\_as\_translatable

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/acts-as-translatable/114045>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [September 7, 2007, 9:45am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/acts-as-translatable/114045 "2007-09-07T09:45:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![matlin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/6a8cbe/32.png) [@matlin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/matlin)\
**Post date:** [September 7, 2007, 9:45am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/acts-as-translatable/114045/1 "2007-09-07T09:45:10Z")

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I’m hoping someone can help me with this.

The default behavior for acts\_as\_translatable is to return the  
original field if it can’t find a translation, but in this case I want  
it to return a NULL value for untranslated fields.

The reason is that I have textareas that are supposed to be empty if  
there is no translation present.

I was thinking this would be quite easy since it is able to return the  
untranslated fields.